


Under the Stars

by BeaRyan



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Canon Disabled Character, F/M, Fluff, canon adjacent
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-24
Updated: 2014-11-24
Packaged: 2018-02-26 20:36:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,698
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2665511
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BeaRyan/pseuds/BeaRyan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In response to the Tumblr prompt for a Raven x Wick fic set after Abby slapped her.  Set during 2x05.  He didn't know what they were to each other exactly.  Friends didn't cover it, lovers was too romantic, and friends with benefits seemed to cheapen both the friendship and the benefits.  Whatever this was, when Wick found Raven curled up on her mattress in the corner of the engineering office, he couldn't just leave her there alone with her pain.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Under the Stars

Raven curled around her pillow on a pile of blankets in the corner of the engineering and machine shop where she slept at Camp Jaha and wished for physical pain instead of this horrible ache. Abby had taken Raven into her confidence, included her in her plans. She'd trusted Raven's expertise to get her from space to earth in one piece. It was pretty much the highest compliment a person could get - "I trust you with my secrets and my life" - and it had grown even beyond that. Abby had trusted her to get to Clarke, to save Clarke and everyone in space by proving that earth was habitable. Abby had treated her like a hero when she'd needed one. 

When the bullet had left her a with an awful choice, Abby had let her make it and respected her enough to go through with her plan. Abby hadn't thought she was weak for screaming as she cut out the bullet; she'd just gotten on with it, ignoring Raven's pain and doing whatever she could to solve her problem. The doctor had cared for her, not just in body, but in mind, and now it was over. With one slap Abby had let her know what she was worth to her and how quickly she could lose her utility. 

Just like with her mother, Abby's demanded obedience from her human tools. Now Raven would have to earn her way back. She'd wanted Abby's friendship before, craved the approval of someone educated, powerful and connected, but now she needed it. She was disabled, dependent on others like she hadn't been since she was a child. She knew what rejection and fear felt like; they were old friends, an ache as comfortable as keys in her pocket. Keys opened something though, and now she felt trapped. 

"Don't shoot," Wick called out before he pushed open the door. He glanced at the human ball on the makeshift mattress. "No need to get up either." 

"Like I could," she answered. 

"Raven, you can and will do whatever the hell you want. Sometimes you're fast, sometimes you're slow, but if you want it, you get it done every time." 

"Not this time." 

"Then I'll get down." He lay down behind her and curled around her, coughing briefly as he breathed through her dusty hair. Dust had never been a problem on the Ark. Unfiltered air was a pain in the ass. 

"You can't do this," she said. "Abby suspects it was me. If she hears about this, she'll know it was you, too." 

He gave her a brief squeeze before standing up and grabbing two corners of the blanket she lay on and giving it a tug, dragging it and Raven along with it towards the narrow passage between the work table and the wall. 

Raven’s misery shifted to cold rage. Rage could be managed. "What are you doing?" she demanded. 

He grunted and tugged again, moving her three feet forward in a quick burst of movement that knocked her on to her back. "Supply closet." 

She gaped at him briefly, unable to form words in the face of such a big, blond ball of stupidity. "Not now." 

He dropped the corners of the blanket. "Yeah, now. You need a damn hug and you won't let me hug you out here, so supply closet." 

"Yeah, Wick. A hug. I'm sure that's what you had in mind when you started hauling my bedding into a closet." 

He leaned against the table and glared down at her. "You already know I have better moves than this. Getting you naked is a hell of a lot easier than being your friend. Do you really have so many you can afford to take my head off for trying?" 

"This is you trying to be my friend?" 

He nodded.

"And not just trying to get me naked?" 

He shrugged. "If we end up naked then it happens, but it wasn't part of my plan." He ran a hand through his hair. "Look, I heard what happened with Abby. About the slap. I know you like her." 

"I don't want to talk about this." 

"I already guessed that, thus the cuddling."

She sat on the blanket, no longer in the corner but not all the way to the storage closet either and stared up at him. He was who she had. She'd never really thought much about him on the Ark. He was one of the arrogant punks in engineering. They kept to themselves, thought they knew things, acted like some problems were theirs alone to solve. Now that everyone knew about the CO2 scrubbers some of that attitude made a little more sense as did some of the demands for incredibly specific parts that didn't seem to fit anything. He seemed like a reckless fool on the surface, but he was also a man who'd kept secrets for a living and had agreed to keep another one today when he'd shut down the grid. 

"Why'd you help me today?" she asked. 

"Why'd I let the girl the Grounders have accepted as one of their own outside the wire to stop a couple of teenage delinquents with machine guns from invading the closest thing we have to allies on this planet? Because I'm not stupid. Only Abby thought it was a bad idea, and if Clarke hadn't insisted on going we'd have all come out to wave off Octavia and Bellamy."

"It didn't have anything to do with me?"

"I respect you enough to tell you if your idea sucks. It didn't." 

Respect. Was that what she felt from him? Was that the reason the first time with Wick hadn't been enough? He’d figured out what her body could and couldn't do and had still made it sing. She’d felt exposed, vulnerable, but before she’d had a chance to begin her escape, he'd kissed her neck and her cheeks and whispered words she couldn't remember but that had put her back in charge. He'd let her pretend she'd done him a favor by tangling her fingers in his hair and burying his face in her lap. She'd done him the honor of letting him hold her uncooperative leg out of the way while he'd buried himself inside her. He might be more experienced and more mobile, but he always acted like they were equals. Even at work, she may have been a "damn mechanic" but he let her know that she was needed and valuable.

"Have you ever been on a spacewalk?" she asked. 

He blinked a few times, trying to follow the sudden twist in the conversation before just deciding to ride the wave. "No." 

"Why not?" 

"It's a specialized skill and I'm not trained. Someone else could do a better job fixing the Ark from that angle than I could." 

"I did a lot of them," she said. 

"Yeah, well, you could weld like a boss in your fancy magnetic shoes. Thanks for keeping the walls from peeling off. What are we really talking about?" 

She didn't answer. Maybe he didn't know why Finn was in the Skybox. She'd never really understood the spacewalker stunt, but she always wondered what made him think he could just steal her uniform and do something she'd spent years learning to do. Finn was lucky he'd only wasted air. He could have easily died and taken a lot of other people with him. She didn’t want to talk about Finn. "I miss the stars," she said. "I used to be closer to them. Now there are wires around the camp and lights at night. They feel further away." 

He smiled. "From a strictly mathematical point of view, the difference is negligible, but I know what you mean." He crossed his arms and leaned back against the table, mentally checking and rechecking his plan before presenting it. "Have you tried climbing in your brace yet?" 

"No. Why?" 

"Better to find out now than later. Let's go." 

"Shouldn’t we get some sleep?"

“Sleep is for people with nothing better to do.”

“Where are we going?” she asked. 

“To the heap,” he said, using his name for the large scrap of the Ark that dominated one corner of the camp. “Bring tools. Look like a mechanic." 

"What tools? What should I look like I'm fixing?" 

"There are three mechanics on this base and the other two are in bed. Bring something that looks to a security guard like you're working on a structural diagnostic." 

"Wick, that's not a thing." 

He offered a hand to pull her to standing. "You're pretty small to be such a huge pain in the ass." 

She took his hand but shoved against his shoulder as she moved past him. "Big enough to knock you on yours." 

He grabbed her blankets and tossed them back into the corner. There'd be time later to talk about finding a better place for her to sleep. The council was already trying to assign quarters, forcing people into easily checked boxes. Stealing time together was going to get hard sooner rather than later. That was part of the reason this needed to be tonight. 

She gathered a few tools, the kind that were easily hung from a belt and looked like she was working, and a portable data recorder while he stuffed climbing gear they'd used to fix the taller shafts on the Ark in a shoulder bag. She smiled to see the magnetic handholds and footholds again and hoped he didn’t notice she was sweating. 

"What's your plan, crazy man?" 

"The exact opposite of a spacewalk. We're going up the outside of the Ark now that it's parked on Earth. Should be a nice view of the stars." 

"You're insane." 

"That's common knowledge." He tossed the bag over his shoulder and led the way across the open space to the hulk of welded metal. It had once been a beautifully precise creation, its image a source of national pride. Now, forced into service years past its expected life, dinged by space debris, patched and thrown to the ground, the abuse the structure had suffered showed. "It was declared stable enough to climb earlier today. We're going up," he said. "If we can pop the doors on top, we can get into cargo bay four and see if there are any electrical bits that weren't smashed and fried."

"You sound optimistic," she said dryly.

"If we can't get in, the exterior of the docking bay is face up towards the sky. We'll have a nice little nest to hide in and stare at the stars." 

"How hard are we going to try?" 

"I'm design," he said. "You're labor. Did you bring anything that can open a door sealed internally against the forces of space?" 

"No." 

"We’re probably not going to try very hard. Know how to use the rigging to get up there?" 

"Yeah."

"Think you can do it?" 

She studied the structure. The first fifty feet was a moderate slope and she was confident she could use the rigging and magnetic hand and foot grips to get up there, but the last twenty feet, the final steps to the bay she was almost certain they wouldn't be able to get open were almost perpendicular to the ground. With only one leg she'd have to rely on her upper body for much of the distance. When work in air shaft on the station there had been safety lines hung from above and a winch system, and in space she’d been able to use magnets on both feet and both hands essentially walking up the wall like climbing a ladder. While they did have positionable lines, she’d be repositioning them every few feet. "Maybe. It will be slow." 

"Talk me through it," he said. 

She explained the problem, and he offered his solution. "If I go first and fasten off lines then you'll be able to get up, right?" 

She shrugged. "That would do it." 

"Then up we go." 

Wick stumbled a few times - the work had usually come to him on the Ark - and Raven struggled to work with only one leg instead of two. Climbing was harder than it used to be, more difficult than spacewalking or had ever been, but she was getting it done. Wick hung the first support lines without comment, making it possible for her to keep up without ever admitting that she was falling behind. As she reached each new target, she released the magnetic holds and added them to the climbing gear hooked to her belt. She caught up to him at the ridge where the angle became a sheer ascent to the top of the structure. 

He looked back at the ground, quickly calculating that there weren’t enough gawkers to break his fall if it came to it, and then quickly away. He'd always respected the line between brave and foolish and generally considered the purpose of the mission the tool that drew it. There was no reason to do this except that Raven might like it. 

She smiled as she handed over each piece of the equipment and watched him carefully organize it for the final stretch. She said, "Feels good to be up and alone again."

"You want me to leave?" he asked. He wouldn't until they got to the top. She'd need his help to make the last part of the ascent, and he'd have to stay long enough to make this look like they were working instead of just an excuse to stare down her shirt and watch the way her face tightened and then went blank as she faced each new challenge in their climb. Once they were at the top, though, if she said she didn't want him there he'd leave. Staying where you weren't wanted rarely made someone appreciate you as much as your absence. 

"I think I might want you to kiss me, but we've got a crowd watching." She let her hand linger on his as she handed over the equipment, touching longer than was necessary and dragging out this moment suspended between the earth and the sky.

"Behave, Reyes, or they'll think we're up to something." 

"Aren't we?"

"I got permission for the climb. Not my fault they didn't set a time for it." 

She locked eyes with him in the faint glow of the moonlight, and her heart raced. That was Wick. Just enough permission to keep from getting shot, but unpredictable and unrepentant. 

He ran his thumb over the back of her hand before taking the last piece from her and attaching to his belt. "So are we doing this or not?" 

"I think we're doing this," she said. 

"Then don't hold back. OK?" 

"OK," she whispered. 

Ten minutes later they were at the top in the nest formed by the upended docking bay, and two minutes after that they declared it impossible to open the doors with the tools they had. 

"What now?" Raven asked. 

"We still haven't had a first date. How about dinner under the stars?"

"No food." 

He withdrew one small pouch from his inside his jacket and another emerged from a cargo pocket on his pants. "How do you feel about local seeds that probably won’t kill us and an experimental ration bar?" 

She just laughed and eased herself to a seated position before laying down to stare at the stars that filled the night sky. When he didn't immediately come over, she patted the metal beside her. "Come here, boy," she teased, calling to him in a tone usually reserved for pets. "Let me scratch you behind the ears for being such a good boy." 

He came over and sat down beside her, but before he laid down he caught her eye. "Behind the ear wasn't exactly the itch I was thinking of scratching." 

"Dinner first," she said. "You think I'm easy or something?" 

"I know you aren't easy," he said as he offered a pinch from the seed pouch to her. "But you're worth it." 

Later, with nothing between them and the stars but the cool air of the night, everything did seem easy for a while.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments welcome.


End file.
